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"Given the game's experimental nature, Killian anticipates a skeptical initial reaction from fighting game fans. But the team has gone to various lengths to try to prove its case. It has external funding, so it won't be running a Kickstarter campaign or asking players to donate. It's also going with a free-to-play structure built around selling cosmetics rather than charging for gameplay. And the game will go live in the form of a "technical alpha" version roughly one week after this story posts.​"

"Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and London Venture Partners, a seed investor in Supercell Oy, are backing Radiant Entertainment Inc., a new PC games studio created by the founders of one of the world’s longest running e-sports tournaments.

The $4.5 million by the venture firms is rare for the venture firms. Andreessen Horowitz has backed few gaming startups, and this is London Venture Partners’ first bet on a U.S. startup, following a dozen gaming deals in Europe.

“PC games has been reinvigorated,” London Venture Partners co-founder Paul Heydon said.

He pointed out that Valves Software Inc.’s Steam platform has created a central hub for game developers to post their games, attract and monetize users. “It’s like the AppStore for PC games,” Mr. Heydon said."

"Right now you pay for absolutely nothing. Everything is free. We’re not even going to have a store. I don’t know. It depends when we finish it. For the first six months, I would guess, we won’t have anything to sell at all. But when we look at games we were inspired by, things like Dota — when you say free-to-play, it has such a wide range, and it’s been crapped on by so many terrible practices with games. I don’t even want to say those words. I say, let’s just talk about the people who are doing it right.

Our business is going to be basically cosmetic. Lipstick on robots, obviously, but you get the idea. Games like Dota have shown us that if you build a fun game that attracts a community, you can have a real business doing it that way. If you don’t, well, people don’t like your game. That’s what separates you. You’re not owed a business. That’s on us. But that’s what we want to do. You’ll never have to pay to play."

"In the matches I’ve played in Rising Thunder, I usually end up losing. But it’s never because I couldn’t make my fighter do what I wanted them to do. It’s always because I timed an attack poorly, or I misread my opponent, or they were simply better than I was.”

When speaking with a Gamespot interviewer, Seth and Tom were asked "what place do complex controls have anymore?"

""I've been thinking about that for a while," Killian answered, "and it's pretty hard for me to go back to other stuff in some ways. You could say any input scheme in the world is going to have gameplay around it at the highest level. The input scheme changes, the gameplay changes."

Cannon butted in. "Seth's trying to be diplomatic, or maybe I'm more extreme, but I think complex control schemes have some purpose, but not a lot. There's some satisfaction of being able to do really complicated, hard combos...but for the most part, why? Imagine if in Counter-Strike you had to [do a quarter circle forward] to reload. The fireball in a fighting game is as basic as a jump in Mario Bros., so why shouldn't it be one button?""

A player who was having difficulty getting started shares how the community helped change his mindset and his winrate

"So, earlier this week, I was getting really frustrated with my performance, and I made a thread called "Really hating this game". I got tons of advice from several people on the kind of mindset I should have, what I should try to do when actually playing, etc. A few days later, and after several matches (both wins and losses), I'm having a blast. I feel like I'm learning with every match, I'm figuring out how to adapt to people, and my character is just so much fun to play (Crow). Thanks to anyone who gave me advice, and thanks to Radiant for just making a great fighting game."

"I was a designer on one version of Street Fighter while Seth Killian assisted with other Street Fighter games. I was an Evolution staff member a long time ago while Seth still is. I wrote the book on competitive games, Playing to Win, while Seth wrote the great Domination 101 series. I even quote a few paragraphs of Domination 101 in Playing to Win. It's clear that we're cut from the same cloth and have similar experiences with competitive fighting games. We've each even represented the US at the Super Battle Opera Tournament in Japan.

So it's not too surprising that we've each independently been working on different fighting games that have the same emphasis on making moves easy to do; me with Fantasy Strike and Seth with Rising Thunder. As Seth has recently said in various interviews, no one is excited about Daigo (one of the best players in the world) "not missing his fireball inputs over and over." They are excited that Daigo gets in your head, sets you up, and makes generally great decisions. Somehow he manages to make even better decisions in high pressure situations, and often expresses his creativity in those moments. That's exciting stuff. When you love something, you want to tell the world about it and I think both Seth and I love this stuff and want as many people to be able to experience it as possible. That means getting rid of execution barriers so that more people can get to the good stuff sooner."

"Rising Thunder deserves very special mention here for having Tony Cannon behind it, the creator of the awesome GGPO networking system. I was actually one of the first players (the very first?) to test GGPO back in the day. I remember that my feedback on his first pass which had really no optimizations and no other testing at all was that it was noticeably better than any other fighting game networking I had ever used. Tony was very excited to hear that because he said there were all sorts of things he could do make online even less laggy feeling. He of course went on to do just that and, using the "rollback" technique, created hands-down the best online tech for fighting games. If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that Rising Thunder is going to have fantastic networking from a technical standpoint."

"[Playing the game] Online has been great for us, but as you add people, you need to make sure that scales.We have some super talented engineers who we’re extremely lucky to have. Some straight from Google, who we really can’t afford to pay what they’re worth, but they want to make games. So we’re lucky to have world-class network engineers."